What came into my mind again and again, as I watched the first seven hours of Ken Burn’s documentary on the Vietnam War, was Martin Buber, the vortex of indecision, and the two stages of evil.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy does a better job than I can of summarizing.
The first stage of evil is “sin,” occasional* directionlessness. Endless possibility can be overwhelming, leading man to grasp at anything, distracting and busying himself, in order to not have to make a real, committed choice. The second stage of evil is “wickedness,” when caprice is embraced as a deformed substitute for genuine will and becomes characteristic. If occasional caprice is sin, and embraced caprice is wickedness, creative power in conjunction with will is wholeness. The “good urge” in the imagination limits possibility by saying no to manifold possibility and directing passion in order to decisively realize potentiality. In so doing it redeems evil by transforming it from anxious possibility into creativity. Because of the temptation of possibility, one is not whole or good once and for all. Rather, this is an achievement that must be constantly accomplished.
In other words, people stumble into sin, but they choose to be wicked.
For more than twenty years the United States stumbled deeper and deeper into the war overwhelmed by directionlessness, by endless possibility, grasping at anything in order to not have to make a real, committed choice.
As an illustration of the way such directionlessness leads to sin, Buber gives a metaphysical interpretation of the first murder:
In contradistinction to the first humans [Adam and Eve], Kain does not reply to God’s address, he refuses to account to him for this deed. He refuses to face the demon at the threshold; he thus delivers himself to the latter’s ‘desire’. Intensification and confirmation of indecision is decision to evil.
So Kain murders. He speaks to his brother, we are not told what he says; he goes with him into the field; he strikes him dead . . . Why? No motive, not even jealousy, is sufficient to explain the monstrous deed. We must remember that it is the first murder: Kain does not yet know that such a thing exists, that one can murder, that if one strikes a person hard enough one strikes him dead. He does not yet know what death and killing are. It is not a motive that is decisive, but an occasion*. In the vortex of indecision, Kain strikes out, at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance. He does not murder, he has murdered.
Buber, M. (1997). Good and evil: two interpretations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
(*An occasional cause in metaphysics is some circumstance preceding an effect which, without being the real cause, becomes the occasion of the action of the efficient cause.)
Some people may feel that it is a bad time to reflect on the Vietnam war when we are besieged and overwhelmed by so many present evils and I admit it was really hard to watch the first seven hours (and there are eleven more to come). I think that makes it all the more important to step back and reflect on the nature of good and evil lest we ourselves be sucked into that vortex of indecision.
Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.
We cannot avoid
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully.
~ Martin Buber